Carolyn Lawrence, the voice of Sandy Cheeks still learning who her squirrel is

Carolyn Lawrence

Photo: Nathalie Babineau-Griffiths / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 13, 1967 Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Voice actress
Known for	The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

Carolyn Lawrence has played Sandy Cheeks for longer than many of the show’s viewers have been alive, and she still admits to finding out who the squirrel is at the same moment they do. “I’m learning as the fans are learning,” she told UPI when Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie arrived on Netflix. The film handed Sandy a family of flying circus squirrels, and Lawrence told Animation World Network that nobody had ever shown her that part of the map. “I made up my own things and some were right. I certainly didn’t know she could fly.”

That gap, between owning a voice and owning a character, runs through her whole career. The Southern drawl attached to a karate-trained scientist in an air-filled diving suit is one of the most recognisable sounds in children’s television, and the woman producing it is barely known outside fan conventions. The drawl is a construction, too. Lawrence did not grow up anywhere near Texas, and she has always described her characters as something she finds in the storyboards rather than in herself: “Not only do I get to read the script, I can actually see what the artists have in mind.”

She was born in Baltimore and grew up in central Ohio, where she sang in the choir at Big Walnut High School in Sunbury without ever training as a singer. Dance pulled her away first. She left high school to take classes in Chicago and performed with Gus Giordano’s jazz company before moving west to Los Angeles, where the early work was the usual patchwork of commercials, extra jobs, voices for talking toys and guest parts on network sitcoms in the early 1990s.

The break came on a sidewalk in Los Feliz. Lawrence was out with a friend who knew the casting director Donna Grillo; Grillo remarked that she had an interesting voice and brought her in to audition for a new Nickelodeon cartoon created by a former marine biologist, Stephen Hillenburg. Sandy first appeared in “Tea at the Treedome”, one of the episodes that launched SpongeBob SquarePants in May 1999: a Texan squirrel living in a dome on the sea floor, building rockets and winning fights. Lawrence credits Hillenburg with the chemistry of the cast that has stayed together ever since. “He cast us more as the people we are,” she told UPI. “He truly saw things that we would bring to the characters, maybe that we didn’t even know we had.”

Through the 2000s her voice multiplied across Nickelodeon. She was Cindy Vortex, the hero’s sharp-tongued rival, in the 2001 film Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and the series that followed, and later Mandragora in the network’s version of Winx Club. At the same time she took jobs that cut straight against Sandy. On Adult Swim’s stop-motion black comedy Moral Orel, which ran from 2005 to 2008, she voiced the title character, Orel Puppington, a devout and cheerful boy whose father is an abusive alcoholic and whose town is thick with religious hypocrisy. The show began as satire and ended close to tragedy, and Lawrence’s guileless boy voice was the instrument it used to make the adults’ cruelty audible.

In 2005 she also became Ashley Graham, the kidnapped daughter of the US president, in Capcom’s Resident Evil 4, and that is where her work met its harshest verdict, though not for the acting. Ashley had been rebuilt during development into a defenceless companion the player must escort, and critics turned her into shorthand for the damsel in distress: Vice ranked her among the lamest characters in video games, and Anita Sarkeesian used her in Tropes vs. Women in Video Games as an example of helplessness that frustrates players. Lawrence described the role plainly as “vulnerable, because Leon has to come to her rescue all the time.” When Capcom remade the game in 2023, it redesigned Ashley to be less of a burden, and the voice went to Genevieve Buechner. It is the voice actor’s particular exposure: the performance is judged through a design the performer did not control, and a remake can quietly replace the person.

Sandy has her own version of that story. Reviewing The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie in 2004, A. O. Scott of The New York Times said he was sorry to see Sandy pushed to the margins. Executive producer Marc Ceccarelli first pitched a Sandy film in 2015 and it went nowhere for years. “I kept hearing whispers,” Lawrence told Animation World Network. “After so many years, I was like, ‘I guess it’s not happening.’ Then, all of a sudden, it was here.”

When it did arrive, on Netflix on 2 August 2024, directed by Liza Johnson, it sent Sandy and SpongeBob to Texas to rescue Bikini Bottom from a villain voiced by Wanda Sykes, with Johnny Knoxville, Craig Robinson and Grey DeLisle as the Cheeks family. It also gave Lawrence two songs. She rehearsed them at home with her elder daughter, then 13. “Even in my living room alone, I’m nervous,” she said. “Nobody’s even watching and I’m afraid to do it.” What moved her was the story underneath: a daughter who leaves the life her family planned and keeps their support anyway. “There are a lot of themes in there that resonate with me.”

The spin-off era has kept her busy. Sandy’s family returned that December in the stop-motion special “Sandy’s Country Christmas”; Lawrence voiced Sandy again in Plankton: The Movie on Netflix in March 2025 and in the theatrical The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants that December, after playing a younger Sandy in the prequel Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years. Away from the sea floor she plays Christy Allison in the web series Goodnight Burbank, holds a real estate licence in the Los Angeles area and has two children. In a 2019 interview with Salon she said parents had told her Sandy was a role model for girls and boys alike, and she credited Hillenburg with refusing to write the character as a stereotype.

The seventeenth season of SpongeBob SquarePants began on Nickelodeon in June 2026, and the network has already ordered two more, with the eighteenth due before the end of the year. An older door may also be reopening: in March 2025 Moral Orel creator Dino Stamatopoulos posted the cover of a script hinting at a film and credited Lawrence, though no studio has approved it. Whichever comes first, she will probably discover what her characters are thinking the way she discovered that Sandy could fly, by turning the page of a script.

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Tags: actors, Liza Johnson, SpongeBob SquarePants, Stephen Hillenburg, Carolyn Lawrence, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, voice actresses

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